Both Sides Now

Well, as a matter of fact it is very cloudy*, actually misty and dreakh, as I park the car opposite the church in Belton. A pretty young woman walking her dog greets me with a cheery hello. This of course gladdens my heart, but the emotional lift is mitigated by the understanding that what she sees is a daft old codger inefficiently compiling his stick, hat, boots and pack from the tailgate, and were I my former youthful and handsome self (I should've been so lucky!) she’d probably have ignored me. But let’s be sunnier than the weather. Maybe sociability and good manners are just par for the course in Rutland.

There are very lovely views to both sides on the way over the border to Loddington. I’m in Leicestershire now, and for a reason. The Dioceses of Leicester and Peterborough share a retreat house at Launde Abbey, and that’s where I’m headed. But first, Loddington, to which I descend by a lane on which not a single vehicle passes me in the couple of miles from Belton. The church of St. Michael and All Angels isn’t where you’d expect it to be - near the crossroads in the little village. It’s over a field, through a gate and up a muddy green track fringed with a carpet of snowdrops. In fact, there are no metalled paths to the church’s door at all. My exit to a lane which doubles as a stream for thirty metres is also grassed, with the exception of a few rough stone steps. This was a plague village and when it was rebuilt the new houses were placed at a distance to all those bad, disturbing memories.

As I write this of course, the novel coronavirus is big news, and who knows what threat it may yet pose beyond the Chinese frontiers. I ask myself, if the worst came to the worst, what should Christian congregations be encouraged to do? I only observe that our consciences sometimes make us reluctant to stay away from worship and allied events (choir practices, shared lunches, PCCs etc.) because we feel we’re letting God down by our absence, and so opportunities are given for viruses to do what they’re built for, and replicate. We have some means at our disposal to gather together collectively on line, but inevitably this would exclude some older and poorer members – exactly the people who need community and communion the most. We were very good at hand sanitisation during the swine ‘flu epidemic. Will that be enough this time? Please God, yes!

The road climbs again past an obviously converted one-time school house and ‘School Farm’, both dated to around 1870, at the beginnings of elementary education for all, although how many children were ever catered for in this sparsely populated area I don’t know. At Copthill Farm the ewes are ready to drop, and I think of the lovely Scottish air ‘Ca the yowes’, and then of my favourite TV ad – for Specsavers – the one where the short-sighted farmer accidentally shears his collie. (The music for that is an Irish song called Mo Ghile Mear… which reminds me a bit of the better known Scottish ballad.) 

At the top of the rise, there’s a splendid view down to Launde, comfortably set down among the low hills. The ‘Abbey’ looks Victorian now, but inside are remnants of its former buildings and status, notably in its small chapel. An Augustinian priory was founded here in 1119, by Richard Basset (long-time visitors to this blog may remember my visit to Sutton Basset a year or so ago, out on the Diocese’s western flank). Thomas Cromwell took a shine to Launde and had it earmarked for his personal enjoyment, but the King removed his head shortly afterwards, and occupancy was left to Thomas’ son Gregory, who’ll be well known to readers of Hilary Mantel.

(Reading back the next few paragraphs, I realise I've come over all intellectual, so either skip a few, or sit in for a bit of Radio 3. I know, I know, it's not a way to build readership in 2020. I'll try to remember to be more rock n'roll next time...) 

How do you feel about ‘retreats’? They don’t come easily to me, I must admit, but I see their merits – and maybe some dangers. Sometimes parish life becomes sooo intense. Little niggles become big issues and people fall out with each other from misunderstanding rather than real differences. As in families, a little time away, even for just 24 hours, can lend a bit of perspective to events, and help set new and better priorities, or re-establish energy for existing ones. On the other hand, the exclusion of key individuals because of cost or other commitments can entrench distrust…

It seems marvellous to me that we have a safe space where all Anglican traditions can come together and find something which speaks to their particular path to God, and as far as I can judge Launde provides that. As so often I turn to Diarmaid MacCulloch, who writes as a critical friend to the Christian faith, rather than as a devotional aid (though perversely, I often find what he says helps me at least in that way too).  In his History of Christianity he writes (pp. 487 ff.) about the Hesychasts and their opponents within the Eastern church during the fourteenth century. At its heart this was a debate/controversy concerning the knowability or not of God, and how one could know him. It’s a tension between personal revelation and tradition/scripture which plays out repeatedly, one could say, in the phylogeny of the Church (the ebb and flow of theory and theology) and in our own particular ontogeny – which is to say we as individuals may feel either thing to be most important at some time in our lives, or even to think both things central/crucial at the same time.  (Is such a thing strictly possible?)

By inclination, and partly by training, I’m a shades of grey person. I tend to see merit in both sides of an argument, and generally think that no one has a monopoly on the right belief or moral attitude. There’s a lot to be said for Hegelian dialectic as a process where (in its most naïve sense) a synthesis is arrived at after the propagation or proposal of a thesis and its antithesis. Even as I write this, I’m thinking of a piano-playing debate I’ve stumbled across about how one should approach Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words? Does one take seriously the comparisons some have drawn with Mozart, and like a youthful Barenboim, play the Lieder lightly and in a kind of ‘surface meaning’ way, or as might befit a composer living when Mendelssohn did (Victoria and Albert’s Elton John-alike!), tackle them with fully-blown Romantic sonority and the largest possible dynamic contrast? Is there a Hegelian solution here? Not really.

Well, you can take your pick re: Mendelssohn, and it’s of no great consequence, and as BBC interviewers are apt to do, opine that it’s a debate which will run and run, though goodness knows some people will get all het up about anything. But seeing Both Sides Now in matters of faith (or social policy, or politics) sometimes just leads to incapacity: we’re rabbits in the intellectual headlights. Which can lead critics to mistake this for being a paid-up member of the Laodicea (Revelation 3: 14-22). But there’s nothing lukewarm about aporia. It can be a hot anxiety.

Still with me…? As I say, I like to think Launde and similar places are safe spaces where all of this can be explored, along with the day to day, mundane nitty gritty of living the down and dirty Christian life.

Talking of down and dirty, that just about describes the next three quarters of an hour, having eschewed the metalled route on towards Withcote, and chosen the hem-hem more direct approach by a path over the hill. It’s sodden and pitted and ultimately frustrating because I can’t find a way to what from the pictures looks like a perfect little Georgian chapel maintained by the Conservation Trust, and which is now always open, according to the kind ladies on the Abbey reception desk. Then the path veers uphill again over three more fields of increasingly mucky pasture until it gains the ridge at about 180 metres, where a farmer has blocked the right of way with an electric fence. Sigh! At least the views west over Leicestershire are some compensation.

Then it’s downhill all the way to Braunston-in-Rutland (to be distinguished from the Northamptonshire canal village) along a stretch of road known as The Wisp. I’m going to make a guess that this was where the mist gathered, though the Web tells me ‘wisp’ is also a collective noun for snipe. Who knew?

The clock on All Saints church in oh so pretty Braunston is bright blue, and large, and stuck on the tower in most unusual and whimsical fashion. The churchyard is also host to a Sheela-na-gig which formed the one side of a doorstep, such that the fertility (?) carving was hidden for centuries and people would have trodden on or across it on their way into worship, knowingly or not. Both these things suggest a long-standing vein of good humour in Braunston to me. And no one quite knows what to make of Sheela-na-gigs.

The day’s drawing in and the way back to Belton is up hill and down dale by pleasant and straight lanes. The light level’s very low, and I’m reminded of those wonderful gloomy early Mondrian paintings where perhaps beguiled by Theosophical thoughts he’s fascinated by the lack of light across the flat Dutch landscape (or maybe just trying out a challenge on light-obsessed, value-light Impressionists). The birds fall silent, except for a solitary screech owl and the flap and call of a pheasant I disturb as I pass. I relax my brain, and let the legs take over.

Members of the PCC: 21 km.  Nearly six hours. 11 deg. 6 stiles. 7 gates. 4 bridges. The church of St. Peter, Belton conveniently open as I return, so that I can divest myself of trousers that post-Withcote look as if I’ve been caving. Taking one’s trousers off in church feels particularly transgressive.

Lord
When all’s said and done
We’re no better than the ancients.
We stand in awe
At the mystery of the world you’ve created here
And the greater mysteries that lie beyond.
We thank you for the extraordinary beauty
Pervading the natural world around us
And the people we know and love.
Our heart fills with gratitude
That we’ve been granted the experience of this day.
We pray that our response to your love
May not be found unworthy.
We pray it through your Son
Our Saviour, Jesus Christ.
Amen.

*Bows and flows of angel hair
  And ice cream castles in the air
  And feather canyons everywhere
  I’ve looked at clouds that way

  But now they only block the sun
  They rain and snow on everyone
  So many things I would have done
  But clouds got in my way

  I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
  From up and down and still somehow
  It’s cloud illusions I recall
  I really don’t know clouds at all.

                        Joni Mitchell